Catching up on 2013

I didn't intend to stop posting on here when I started my tour. But things overtook me. Here's a summary of what some of them were:

  • My book, The Psychology of Price, came out. You should buy it!
  • I started a new business, The Irrational Agency, with a business partner. We've taken the ideas of behavioural economics into the market research and marketing worlds, and tried to go a bit deeper than some of the agencies who appear to have based their behavioural services on reading the first half of Predictably Irrational. We've developed a decision process model (based on some ideas regular readers might have seen on here last year) and been lucky enough to work with some quite cool clients to apply it.
  • I developed my theory of cognitive microfoundations a bit further. It's now primarily based on information processing and attention, informed by a range of empirical decision-making work and on some theoretical work from the likes of Payne, Bettman and Johnson and the adaptive toolbox of Gigerenzer and Todd. I've taken the ideas forward at two workshops – the Summer Institute on Decision Making at the Max Planck Institute, and the EADM JDM Young Researchers' Workshop.
  • There has been some development of similar ideas by other economists too: Xavier Gabaix and Michael Woodford for example (more on their work in a post from the AEA conference soon).
  • I've presented at a few academic conferences - ICP, ICT, SJDM, SPUDM...and some other places like the Professional Pricing Society and conversionsummit
  • A few ideas on intangible products have started to emerge - first into a pricing workshop and maybe into a new book next year.
  • I've visited India, Cuba, South Africa, Canada, the US, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Estonia, Finland and Denmark to follow all these ideas through and meet a bunch of pretty exciting people.
  • I've been doing some writing for other places: as economics editor for the InDecision blog, behavioural blogger for RWConnect, and a contributor to Research Live.

But enough about me. I'm not sure if this break from the blog counts as rational inattention, but I'll get back into the habit of posting regularly in the new year.

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